Co-founders Bryan “Birdman” Williams and Ronald “Slim” Williams also made sure to include him in a quartet known as the Hot Boys that boasted labelmates B.G., Lil Wayne, and Turk for the October crew debut Get It How U Live. While everyone has their respective favorites from that particularly pivotal year (one that brought us Big Pun’s Capital Punishment and DMX’s Flesh Of My Flesh Blood Of My Blood), the impact and legacy of Juvenile’s 400 Degreez easily makes it 1998’s most meaningful contribution to the overall discography of rap.Ī New Orleans native who counted the city’s now-demolished Magnolia Projects as a home, Juvenile officially linked up with Cash Money early in 1997, dropping his first album for the label ( Solja Rags) that May. Very few, if any, of those sales were reported to the RIAA or SoundScan.īreaking beyond those local customs, Master P’s Ghetto D and Mystikal’s Unpredictable, among others, handily earned RIAA platinum status in 1998, with some going on to do even greater such certifications. Often excluded from airwaves and other means exposure outside of select regions in previous years, Southern rappers had long adapted to their situation by selling records in unconventional ways: neighborhood mom-and-pop shops and out of car trunks.
A reckoning was inevitable.Īlmost simultaneously with this grim moment in rap history, New Orleans-based imprints Cash Money and No Limit were proving they could push album units in significant numbers, thanks in no small part to the deals they’d signed with major label groups. The toxic narrative that pitted rappers against one another by geography for so long had assuredly contributed to the tragic loss of two of the genre’s most beloved titans. in 19 inadvertently broadened the conversation beyond the east and west. The respective murders of 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. Though absurd in Internet-age retrospect - which since revealed the full extent of what actually was happening in these vibrant yet overlooked scenes - the legitimacy of hip-hop cities below the Mason-Dixon line in particular was once in question, a product of media-supported fixation. Flare ups outside of Los Angeles and New York like the Miami bass boom that spawned 2 Live Crew or the Houston rap breakthrough of The Geto Boys weren’t granted the necessary oxygen to bring the heat of those cities into the national conversation. While today we celebrate its myriad forms everywhere from Atlanta to Seoul, for much of the time after its unruly birth in The Bronx this music seemed the sacred property of two very specific urban locales. Throughout its first two decades, people mistook hip-hop for a coastal phenomenon.
400 Degreez by Juvenile is the hip-hop Record Of The Month for Vinyl Me, Please.
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